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Right after our last Board meeting, Falk, the person in our local ham radio club who is helping me with the digital modes, came and lent me his own interface so that I could get going with these digital modes. The reason I am not referring to this kind of stuff as "packet" is because one of the first things I discovered was that I was inadvertently and incorrectly lumping everything under the name of "packet", and this is in fact a misnomer. Packet is a special mode unto itself, useful to us probably after the pole shift in that it runs a bit like the Internet, with email and such, and one is able to leave messages for others, and download things. The only thing about packet, and I think it must affect our use of it after the pole shift, is that it depends on repeaters, and even if we manage to get those in place between fairly local sites, will they stay there during the pole shift? They probably will not, therefore I am a bit more doubtful as to whether or not packet will be as useful after the pole shift as we had hoped. I keep meaning to write to Jan about this, but so far, for some reason, have not done so.
The first mode I tried using was TTY, which is teletype. It worked okay when Falk was there to supervise; but when I tried it by myself, all I got coming across my screen was a lot of rubbish. Falk explained to me that there are two "peaks" which must be - I suppose in a certain position on the screen, before anything that makes any sense will come across the screen. You are supposed to be able to identify, by sound, when the peaks are in the proper position, but so far I have failed to do this. Falk has not been well and therefore has been unable to visit me to help in this regard. I, as I say, have been very distracted by other things - I had a terrible cold of my own during Christmas; was distracted by Christmas itself; trying to deal with all the computer problems--which still aren't over. Now I can't send out any email because apparently there is a small error in my settings, although I haven't changed anything, and I can fix it by "clicking on the button below". Yeah, right! The two-metre radio was not working properly, and I discovered in the end that it was because I had inadvertently pressed the power button, and instead of putting out 35 Watts I was putting out five, so no-one could hear me. The local clubs repeaters have not been working properly because they were moved, resulting in our Peel Amateur Radio Wednesday Night Net being put out in simulcast, which meant I could not participate anyway because I couldn't hear anyone but the Net Controller. Now, though we have got the power bit sorted out, the two-metre has somehow lost part of its programming, and this is something which again it will take Bruce (the person who programmed the radio in the first place, and who installed the antenna for the TS570, which is the "big" radio) to sort out.
The next ARES (amateur radio emergency session) meeting of our local club is next Monday, and in this meeting we are going to learn about net management. They are short of net controllers and want me to try and do this, but since I have not been able to participate in the net for the past few weeks, this has not been possible. It was my idea and request that we do a bit of net management training in these emergency meetings, although actually it's really just as easy to get the training by listening! I wanted to do a bit of net controlling so that I can hopefully do a little bit - or maybe a lot - of "pulling things together" just before and after the pole shift. That is the progress so far. Falk has built me my own interface, saving me a couple of hundred bucks. I'm not sure what digital modes it will actually get me, but in any case he says next time he comes around he is going to put me on packet. Meanwhile, I must find a way to make some of these other modes work with JAWS, the speech software. Right now it is tending, on the occasions when I have been able to read the screen, to repeat things as they are being typed, which is really annoying! Sorry this got so long. Progress has not been quite what I had hoped; but although we have, as I say, been plagued with all kinds of technical problems here, some of this lack of progress has been due to my own tendency to procrastinate, something I will shake myself out of when some of these other radio problems get fixed.
Best regards,
Helena
P.S. I did manage to make contact with one of my friends in the States on a pre-arranged frequency. Unfortunately, 40 metres was so bad at that point - full of people and so we were getting overlapping - that it was almost impossible to hear her. We are going to try again, this time on 20 metres. I only picked 40 because she is more familiar with it, but I think she will do all right on 20.